The question of the day was something about a local barter currency ("TEM") somewhere in Greece.

Here's some of what he said:

Quote from: BrotherJohnF

But, again, this is, uhm, the same weakness with this "TEM" is the weakness with all these alternative currencies and I just find it a little bit surprising that they didn't try to use something like the bitcoin. Not necessarily the bit... doesn't have to be a bitcoin, uh, it could be anything else but this suffers from the problem of all currencies, which is: who is in control of the currency and who gets to say how much of it is created and how do people trade and value things.

[...]

Let's say someone offers a haircut. The network determines that's worth 10 credits. Ok, there's the big flaw of these sorts of things here: you do not want to have the network determining what something is worth. Is every haircut equal? What if someone is really poor is giving haircuts? What if someone is really good? So, that's a big flaw to have these assigned prices.

You have to have a free market. [...] You can't have this centrally planned economy like this, it just simply wont work and the pricing mechanism will be broken. [...]

It's an interesting concept [that greek barter currency], it definitely needs some work. It needs to borrow some of the ideas from bitcoin, with a limit on the number that's locked in and some kind of anti-counterfeiting mechnism built into it. If that's not there, then you're totally at the mercy of the people who administer it and you can see what's happened with the federal reserve and how that's worked out.